tJP

Strategic Marketing is about three time horizons:

1. Here and now/this month/quarter
2. The Year
3. Over the horizon - the future market

1. These are the activities that need to be delivered this month, quarter to help deliver sales. If a business generates these activities based on current market feedback then it can fall into a trap where it becomes too TACTICAL.

2. If there is yearly plan then all your activities that you are doing above can follow a theme to create momentum.

3. One of marketing’s least prioritised areas is that of defining the future market - peering over the top of the horizon to understand where customers and consumers ( and therefore the market) will be in 18-36 months time.

The balance that marketing must have is to add resources, time and effort into the longer term activities, whilst continuing to build excellent short-term results. As always you need to be aware of market shifts and be able to respond to them, but not constantly knee-jerk react to every shiny object that passes before us.

Campaign Manager - a career dead end. The days of this popular job category are nearly over - a campaign manager designing a single large, integrated, multi-step, controlled, linear campaign are about to be replaced.

The future campaigns are:

• Small
• Integrated
• Multi-step
• Non-linear
• Uncontrolled

Small - we wont load a tens of thousands of contacts into a campaign and jam them through and get a 2% dribble out the other end. We’ll set up small campaigns that wont fire until maybe only one contact enters the campaign from a survey, but the response rate will be high >20%.

Integrated - we’ll still use DM, email, telemarketing, websites etc. But we’ll look to track and measure each step better

Multi-step - campaigns will more closely match the ‘buyers journey’ rather than the sellers process

Non -linear - campaigns will be flexible and build up a profile or footprint of the contacts in the campaign - its will adjust automatically to their pace and position on the buyers journey

Uncontrolled - as with much happening on the social media front at the moment - brand and product control is being replaced with collaboration with the brand users.

So if you are a campaign manager today, time to rethink and retrain. If you want to become one, start understanding now where the future lies. A good place is to start looking at Marketing Automation.

A B2B marketer has two customers, THE CUSTOMER who buys the product and also the sales team. The sales team is made up of a varied group of individuals with a range of talents - and you deliver them all the same quality leads? A little crazy?

 In all sales teams there are those under-performers and the over-performers. An over performer can take a lead, work through it, qualify it and give you  balanced feedback. It may take a few weeks but you get a good review.

An under performer will likely take your lead and either reject it very quickly or never quite get back to you. The quality and thoroughness of the feedback will leave you underwhelmed.

So what to do? Continue to work with the good sales guy as is. For the not so good, do some lead development, scoring or nurturing on the lead to give yourself a higher confidence level in the lead quality before handing over.

Has Lead Generation and its affect on sales become the only real metric of Marketing ROI? 

Public companies are valued by a mix of tangible and intangible assets. Often the brand is the highest value part of the intangible assets(pat on the back for brand guys).

More and more companies are looking for:

• Continuous flow of leads
• Predictable Revenue
• Improved ROI on the marketing dollar

To achieve this I think marketers need to develop the following:

• Less ‘campaign’ based activities and more ‘trigger’ based activities
• Systematic waterfall reports eg leads, calls, presentations, proposals, sales
• Assigning costs to each activity  and the final cost per lead

This activity is happening in B2B - the tools exist and the channels to market are controlled. Less so in B2C and an area where they will learn from their B2B cousins.

Pressure on B2B marketers for ROI proof is definitely based on lead generation today - and in the future for all marketers.

In the B2B space, everyone is chasing the Lead Gen thing - turning it into and ‘engine’ whereby untold wealth will come a marketers way ( or at least they keep their jobs).

In reality it not the real problem and we’re all chasing shiny hubcaps like the local dogs and not facing the real problem. The real problem is that coming out of a ‘campaign’/activity there are three types of responders:

• Type 1 - Those that meet our ‘lead’ criteria e.g. money, a problem, a project and they have some authority
• Type 2 - Those that don’t meet the ‘lead’ criteria - a bit is missing from the criteria e.g. they are an analyst rather than a general manager
• Type 3 - People who don’t respond

There’s great marketing processes for those that are Type 1- we give them to sales executives! However significant work needs to be done to improve and develop Type 2 leads - to better understand them and to move them forward on the marketing process. I’ll call this Lead Development ( or nurturing if you prefer) and it will be the majority of your responders.

Finally, if we have pulled together our targeting and have the right people, and believe that we have the right problem and solutions, then Type 3 are obviously not ready now - so we need to find ways of keeping in tough and providing them high value content - that will one day have them respond.

So by focussing on Lead Development you’ll put effort into the right part of the Lead Generation problem.

Take a look at your business processes - those that run 24/7/365. They will be those processes to do with how you spend money, build products, distribute products. A great deal of focus on the cost side.

Compare them with the other side of the ledger - the revenue side. The side that brings in the money is not 24/7/365 - even if the website is. The revenue generating processes can be disjointed, irregular, poorly measured and monitored. They may be managed well but it requires high levels of management attention.

So how good could it be if we had a 24/7/365 end to end revenue generating process?

Sales and marketing is sometimes deemed “Part Art, Part Science”. There seems to be little science - particulalry in the sales and marketing processes, and they have not kept up with processes in other parts of a business.

Imagine a car company - they make cars on a production line, same way each time. Or look at the way a jet engine is made - each step mapped out, checked, validated and measured. These environments have long and mature tool-sets like Six Sigma and Lean to help them monitor and improve processes.

Take a look at the sales and marketing processes of those same companies and you’ll find limited processes, limited measurement, little validation and a new way to do something for each campaign. Why?

Why is marketing’s lead generation, lead development and handover to sales not a better, more repeatable and predicatble process? I think we need to take a look at how we can create a steady stream of leads to sales, that takes advantage of modern automation and the 1:1 relationship skills of sales.

Comments most welcome.

It seems that the Australian Federal Government will enact a ‘do not call register for business’ after the Senate Committee recommended that the new law be passed.

I fully understand the reason why the law is needed - I once spent a month in an out-bound cold calling call centre. One of those who’s role is to sell you a loyalty card for a hotel chain, or something similar. They are absolutely a pain as they are trained to close the sale there and then. The centre was broken down to those who had spent years there and the newbies that had just been trained - who might last a week or two at most. A business does not want to receive these calls! Hence the drive for a register.

However, in its current form the register will damage business. One client already washes the residential do not call register against the calls to be made - to ensure that they comply - as many small businesses work out of a home office. This has already reduced their capabilities to make customer calls. In my opinion they have over reacted to the privacy laws and the current do not call register - as they(think) they would be hammered in the press if they did not.

Things are likely to get very grey in this area. For example,  imagine Company A has a product that will reduce the cost of building a widget by 50%.

Company A knows that Company B builds widgets and would get benefit from it. But company A cannot contact company B as they are on the DNCR. If the Production manager at Company B hears about the product and wants to know more - but leaves a switchboard number and not his mobile number - his call may not be returned as they are on the DNCR.

Consequences - Company B goes out of business? Or does Company A risk the law and push ahead and make contact?

Industries that may struggle with this include phone, banks, insurance, IT - and not the Optus, Westpac, QBE’s but the thousands of brokers/resellers who distribute their products to other small businesses.

We would all like to get off the call list of hotel loyalty cards, but we don’t want to lose our business because of it!

When marketing and selling to business a common belief is that only problems get investment. Managers will likely spend much more time and effort fixing problems than developing new ideas. So the key is ‘Make and cultivate problems’.

Its not the same case in consumer marketing, on first view. Reviewing a few of the hot current applications, products I think that some truly hot products do fix some problems:

Twitter - as SMS and IM traffic increased, its becomes harder to keep multiple conversations going, especially if moving from PC to mobile -  so Twitter is useful as you can broadcast yet keep direct communications with key people. I also find it useful as a source of interesting subjects to read.

Chomp - a brand new iPhone application that helps to evaluate, rank and rate other iPhone applications - the problem is the 100,000 apps on the market and working out the good, the bad and the ugly. Co-founder is Ben Keighran of BluePulse.

FourSquare - is application that lets you tell people where you are, from your phone. As we communicate while mobile, want to share our location. Funnily enough, this was where BluePulse was 5 years ago - maybe the time was not right, because the problem wasn’t there?

Kindle - makes buying, carrying and reading a selection of books really easy.

Google Search - other Search engines( Yahoo!, Alta Vista) were not providing us the information we wanted.

MS Office - while Word and WordPerfect competed, as did Excel and Lotus 123, Office had the field open to it. The problem was a new set of non technical users who wanted a common set of commands and menus.

These are examples of successful products( Chomp is to new ) and they do seem to fix a problem.

In addition, they are NOT “better mousetrap” products eg Bing vs Google, which will be long drawn out battle.

So, if you have a new product for market, and want it to be a success, keep on innovating and work out the key problem it fixes.

Have any examples, please add them.

“Twitter is dying” prompted me to look at what the issues for Twitter. They are typical of a fast growing company in technology. In particular Twitter is a disruptive technology and it can learn from the success of Facebook on what to do next.

According to comScore the Australian audience of Internet users was 12.3m in June 09. Looking at the use of Social media with these audiences, you find that Facebook is used by 49% of this audience, Twitter by 6.4% and Digg 3.5%.

This is important data when considering what type of people are currently using these tools. Using the diffusion of innovation curve below and looking at the penetration rates - then its clear that Facebook is now entering the Late Majority stage of its adoption curve - where the overwhelming pressure from peers is influencing usage.

Both Digg and Twitter are in the Early Adopter phase. This is usually characterised by opinion formers and ‘role models’ driving adoption. The next phase for both of these companies is to grow into the Early Majority phase - this is one where the pace slackens, users are more deliberate and users are willing to adopt only after peers have adopted. Unfortunately the opinion leaders in the early phases have no influence on this next phase.

This original work by Everett Rogers was then extended by Geoffrey Moore to look specifically at high technology products from start-up. Commonly known as “Crossing the Chasm” , Moore’s book looks at the different stages and how there is a chasm between the Early Adopters and the Early Majority. The key lessons for Twitter and for Digg is that they need to focus on changing their strategies to be successful.

Currently Twitter is targeting the rare breed of people who have the insight to match an emerging technology to a strategic opportunity - prepared to take on a high-visibility, high risk project.

Their successors in Early Majority detest risk, waste of money and time. The quality of the product is key and will tend to communicate more with others from within their own social group of industry - rather than look outside. The way to success in this segment and ultimately for the whole market is to focus on a niche, to dominate that niche and to build a reference base in the pragmatists within that niche. Then to grow the niche and then develop another niche and grow from there.